17 3 Art and Moral Education

The idea of ​​the connection between morality and art, the nature of their interaction is one of the fundamental problems that has attracted the attention of aesthetic theory throughout the history of its development. The importance of art for the spiritual development of man, including moral education, was first realized by the ancient Greeks. Moral and artistic-aesthetic principles of vitality appeared to be so interconnected that the absence of artistic skills was considered evidence of immorality. Thus, according to Polybius, "the bad reputation of the Cynetes, one of the tribes of the Arcadians, considered to be devoid of good habits, is associated in public opinion with the fact that they did not know music" (italics by the author - V. M.) [4, p. 341]. Aristotle provides a justification for the connection between morality and art based on an aesthetic analysis of tragedy and comedy, taking into account the characteristics of the hero's character, the type of conflict, and the cathartic effect of art on man. In the Age of Enlightenment, this problem becomes central in the aesthetics of J. Rousseau, A. Shaftesbury, F. Schiller, G. Gogol. The art of realism, focused on the idea of ​​educational influence, unfolds a complex picture of human life, in which good and evil are in constant conquest of space, a tragic conflict simultaneously reveals the nobility of good and the demonism of evil. Throughout the history of mankind, in the contradictions of life, often tragic, it is art and aesthetic theory that affirm the value of good, which is revealed by beauty in the spiritual world and the actions of heroes. Therefore, two directions of interaction between art and morality are determined in the context of art as a special form of consciousness and a special type of spiritual experience. The first is an artistic display of the value of morality, unfolds through humanity in the actions of art heroes, their relationships with the world. This type of experience is especially valuable in eras of spiritual stagnation, decline of social habits, because it allows us to maintain the image of what is due in human relations as an image of the human attitude to life in the person of its bearers. The second type of connection between morality and art is the spiritually-forming influence of the aesthetic experience of artistic perfection of works of art. They organize the spiritual structures of the subject on the moral and aesthetic attitude to the object of indifference.

Aesthetic theory, based on the laws of the artistic life of art, convincingly proves the harmonizing influence of the artistically beautiful on the mental structures of the individual. It sees the determinacy of their connection by the unity (but not the identity) of the ethical and aesthetic forms of social life. Another thing is that for an unformed psyche, in particular at an early age, a social environment with non-moral orientations can lay the foundation for a stable rejection of beauty and goodness. Society, caring about the future, is obliged to protect the younger generation from disappointment in beauty, defenseless against evil. Otherwise, it will form cynics or indifferent people, which in itself creates a hopelessness of society.

The influence of art on the moral consciousness of a person is widely tested by the theory and practice of aesthetic education. Aesthetic and pedagogical theory consider art an important source of formation of a morally educated personality. This can be traced in the works of K. Ushinsky, V. Sukhomlinsky, B. Yemenskaya, M. Kiyashchenko. Highly artistic works, with stable communication with them, are capable of generating immunity to evil and ugliness. Moreover, they can encourage the improvement of reality according to the laws of aesthetics.

The creative-formative ability of art is not that it gives an image of perfect reality, but that it reveals objective prerequisites for the affirmation of beauty and humanity, shows that they are not somewhere outside of man, but are conditioned by the level of morality and creative skills of the sub 'object of vitality. In essence, art is a specific way of creating an ideal reality that reflects the image and essence of the real world. In terms of the way of being, it is an ideal reality, and in essence, it is a natural manifestation of the level of perfection of ideas about spiritual values, the image of which lives in the consciousness of society, being objectified in the work of its artists.

A striking example of an artistically convincing manifestation of morality in its conditioning by the qualities of the subjects of spiritual experience are folk tales. In them, true good always triumphs over evil. However, the philosophy of the fairy tale is that the victory of good over evil is always a consequence of the efforts of a person (the fairy tale hero), who has suffered from injustice. This is the image of a younger brother, deprived of an inheritance and doomed by fate to poverty and a disenfranchised position in the family. A heightened sense of justice encourages the hero to actively compete with fate. Fairy tales convincingly testify: in this competition, the hero moves in life only along moral paths precisely because he suffered and hated evil. The path to justice is difficult, since evil and envious people hinder the hero in every possible way. Stirrup

to take away the goods he has honestly acquired, they deprive him of life. And only natural forces save the hero: they bring him back to life, help him defeat evil, and not with cruelty, but with kindness. The popular consciousness holds the image of goodness for all problems of relationships. This image appears as the result (and process) of its creation, and therefore, the soul of the hero shines in it, and the fairy-tale kingdom and the princess who becomes his wife are only a reward of fate for human qualities. Culture, at least in this way - as an ideal image of goodness - affirms its value for life. It is seen as a condition for the normality of life, the idea and image of which must be held in consciousness and, if possible, embodied in reality.

The value of art for the spiritual health of humanity is that the world, revealed in artistic images, does not simply arise as a statement of the existence of good and evil in it. Art unfolds the processes of their interaction, through which the essence of the conflict is revealed - the unfolding of the real qualities of evil and good in it. Each of these realities (either concentrated in a single personality or distributed into the worlds of several carriers) reveals the regular in the processes of creating the experience of relationships. When good wins in them, it is revealed that thanks to its victory the world becomes better, prospects for further improvement appear in it. Hegel analyzes the regular influence of art on reality taking into account the basis of its internal vitality, since it is real as spiritualized beauty. The philosopher notes: "Returning to harmony with its true concept, everything that in other forms of existence was disfigured by accidental and external features, art frees the phenomenon from rice inappropriate to this true concept and creates an ideal with the help of such purification" [3, p. 164]. To concretize the thought, he resorts to a convincing example - a portrait of a person. It is one thing, the philosopher notes, to convey the face of the person being portrayed in superficial and external features, and quite another to depict his true features that express the soul of the person being portrayed. Here it is necessary to bring the external existence to the spiritual, that is, when the external acts as a comparable way of revealing the spirit. Therefore, there is a complete coincidence of the internal and external elements of the work. It is precisely this coincidence that should be borne in mind when talking about the nature of the ideal in art. Deepening into the ideal world of artistic beauty contributes to the self-organization of feelings, imagination and memory for the constant content of the image of perfection in order to feed on it and strive to provide real life with the rice of aesthetic perfection.

The ability of an aesthetic attitude, formed in empathy with the heroes of art, is tested for its compliance with perfection in moral interactions with the world. Artistic treasures of world art only then become an effective factor in creating spiritual experience when the depth of content and perfection of artistic form, having passed through the spiritual experience of the individual, become the formative basis of consciousness.

The influence of art, no matter how paradoxical and sad it may be to state this, is most often clearly manifested in situations of the opposite, that is, in situations where there is a deforming influence of pseudo-art on the spiritual structures of the individual. The effect of the impact in this case is due to the fact that for the moral and for the aesthetic it roots a person in the existing and the only real experience for her, without requiring any spiritual efforts, does not encourage any doubts in her value ideas about the meaning of life. Thus, it roots a limited image of experience as the only true one.

The qualitative difference of artistically perfect art is in its ability to encourage the consciousness of the subject of aesthetic experience to dialogue with itself. It unfolds as a dialogue with the existing self in the name of the perfect self, stimulated by the world of heroes of art. Characterizing this feature of art, F. Nietzsche notes that artists instill in people sight and hearing, teach them to hear and see what each of them represents. "... Only they taught us to value the hero hidden in each of the ordinary people, and the art - as from afar and as if in a simplified and enlightened way to contemplate ourselves as a hero - the art of "staging ourselves" in front of ourselves. Only in this way do we overcome ... some of the base details inherent in us "[6, p. 559]. The ultimate goal of dialogue with oneself corresponds to the ideas about the value of catharsis: having realized the mediocrity of oneself, the person goes deeper into his "I", striving to find features of spiritual kinship with the hero and paths of spiritual ascent to a morally determined perfection of man.

The real possibility of the educational impact of the beauty of art is conditioned, firstly, by the structural organization of the human psyche: the disposition to harmonious interaction with the world. The conclusion of reality in artistically perfect ways of its existence, characteristic of art, meets the needs of man

the person to harmonize his relations with this ideal world to create an aesthetic certainty of feelings. In this way, a type of experience is acquired that is consistent in its initial principles, in which the ideal and reality interact on the conditions of consistency. This is precisely why art is capable of being or not being the most effective source of creating the spirituality of experience - its aesthetic certainty. Humanity has not developed another type of experience where it would stand in its creation as a process and at the same time as its effectiveness: the orientation of the spirit towards harmonious (or disharmonious) - depending on the molding sources - interaction with the world.

Secondly, the educational impact of art is conditioned by the aesthetic nature of artistic formation. The method of creating the universality of the image of vitality - in the forms of perfection - is the source of creating the universality of the content of feelings with their individual uniqueness. The sources of this ability are not in a specific work of art, but in its artistry as the only real way of creating and preserving the integrity of spiritual experience. The sources of the said universality are conditioned, as K. Jung rightly notes, by the fact that each work of art takes a person deeper into the unconscious, calling up from the depths of the psyche the memory of "prototypes" or "archetypes" [8, p. 283]. The fullness of perception is conditioned by the ability to delve into layers of meanings in order to read symbols. "A work is a developed image in the broad sense of the word. This image is accessible to analysis provided that we are able to recognize a symbol in it," K. Jung specifies [8, p. 281].

Note that the symbolism of artistic imagery has a dual nature, which accordingly affects the perception and experience of a work as a source of aesthetic and moral experience. The first type is symbols that have developed over the long development of artistry and reflect the features of the universal in the experience of humanity's attitude to reality. This is morality that has fit into aesthetic forms of manifestation in integral works of art. That is, symbols were not defined as specifically artistic phenomena, but rather the opposite: artistry was created as a way to enclose symbols in a system of images so that their "coded" content could fully unfold with its formative capabilities. Here the image acquires the meaning of spiritual reality, which the imagination sees as capable of influencing the physical, natural reality, controlling it, setting its logic of development and forms of manifestation. It is precisely this semantic load that contains insults to mythology and mythoes - cultural phenomena that concentrate the experience of the collective unconscious. (Recall that according to F. Sh., the origins of art are precisely in mythology). Essentially defined by the universality of content, and then the universality of the way of creating the experience of feelings, image-symbols are the formative beginning of human feelings - their humanity. They concentrate the spiritual beginning as "choral", the source of creating the public life. Art in the history of its formation, fitting into the system of ritual actions, stood as a type of social activity, formed the public feelings. That is, the emotional manifestations of the subject acquired a morally determined character: his consciousness was organized by the universality of the content of social experience. Invested in aesthetic forms of organization, and therefore above the everyday life, he stood behind the process of his "creativity" and according to the forms in which he invested, as a unity of the aesthetic and moral principles of the spirit.

The second type of symbolic imagery developed in artistic creativity, reflecting the universal in an individualized way of its vitality. This is "author's" art. It also has a symbolic nature, but uses the symbol as a stable cultural form in a new type of spiritual experience, and therefore provides symbolic images with a new way of vitality. With respect to the named type of artistic form-making, the archetypal nature of the symbol acquires new horizons of vitality and simultaneously deepens consciousness to comprehend its depths. K. Jung, characterizing this type of imagery, notes: “The creative process, insofar as we are able to trace it at all, consists of the unconscious spiritualization of the archetype, its development to the completion of the work of art. The artistic development of the prototype is in a certain sense its translation into the language of modernity, after which everyone gets the opportunity, so to speak, to regain access to the deep sources of life, which would otherwise remain behind seven locks for him” [8, p. 284]. The analysis of two types of artistic formation is important in the context of the analysis of the connection between morality and art in that it reveals their natural character both at the level of the creation of moral experience by humanity and at the level of its affirmation in art by the integrity of the image of morality from

to the world.

So, within art, one can distinguish at least two levels, or modes, of functioning of artistic experience, determining the nature of perception and experience of its phenomena. The first is not individualized artistry, which reflects the universality of feeling, and therefore, not a reflexive type of aesthetic experience. It is not designed for a dialogue of experiences, but creates feelings of community as a kind of coordinated whole, in fact, it is aimed not at cognition of the qualities of the real world in the artistic image of their being, but at self-realization in feelings, the certainty of the symbol, in which the being of the object of indifference has fit. The spiritual structures of a person, since they are formed by the named type of imagery, during an encounter with it are organized, according to its logic, unconsciously for the subject. This is the phenomenon of the "unconscious of mythology", or "collective unconscious". Folk epics, in particular fairy tales, belong to this type of experience.

The second type of imagery is the author's creativity, associated with the individualization of the image of the world in the activity of artistic formation. The imagery of this type of art also contains a "prototype", but one that will be revealed to human perception as recognizable, since reality shines through in it. A kind of layering of experiences occurs, and then the universality of the content, its symbolic essence in an individual artistic-figurative way of being, is concentrated in the work. Author's art creates a real basis for a dialogue of experiences: in the past and in the present, individual and universal, the artist and the subject of the experiencing relationship. Differentiation of the mentioned types of experience, concentrated in art, is important for understanding the connection between morality and art, since it reveals its lawful nature.